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A popular author of young-adult fiction who made his name chronicling his own teenage depression killed himself in Brooklyn today, reports the LA Times. Ned Vizzini, 32, jumped from his parents' roof, his brother tells the AP. Vizzini first found success with his 2006 autobiographical novel It's Kind of a Funny Story, which later got turned into a feature film with Zach Galifianakis. Other books include Be More Chill, Teen Angst? Naah, and The Other Normals.

He was currently working on a middle-grade House of Secrets book series with director Chris Columbus. Vizzini may have used humor in his work, but Vizzini's brother says he struggled with mental illness for years and had gotten worse recently. "At his signings, countless kids would approach him to say that he changed their lives—he gave them hope," publisher Alessandra Balzer of Balzer + Bray said in a statement. Vizzini had a wife and young son.

He looks a little like Seth Rogen after having surgery to look like Burt Reynolds.

NSA-CIApuppet

Dec 23, 2013 12:21 PM CST

Actually his brother lacks insight. Depression is very rarely mental illness and almost always a biological disorder that is not amenable to talk therapy but only to medication, if anything. It has nothing to do with the ego, alter ego, id, super ego, unconscious, or past experiences. Those who suffer with it cannot ever just "snap out of it". Progress and enlightenment in attitudes is a myth: those with these diagnoses are on the long list of bigotry, alongside blacks, gays, immigrants, women, obese, dwarfs, childless persons, elderly, pit bulls, homely persons, other species, foreigners, libertines, the unemployed, intellectuals and many more. The favorite pastime of humankind is denigrating "them". Tribalism, the bane of human history.